Occupy Your Money [occupygeorge.com] is a DIY project that aims to circulate dollar bills stamped with infographics to clarify the disparity of wealth in America to the masses. For instance, the illustrations show how the richest 1% of Americans control over 1/3 of the wealth, how the 'average' CEO earns 185 times more than the average worker, or how just 400 Americans control as much wealth as the bottom half of the entire country.

The required infographic templates can be downloaded, which allows you to use your home inkjet printer (and your own dollar bills, I am afraid) in order to participate.

Maybe these enterprising individuals should also put infographics detailing income mobility in the United States? Oh wait, that's a little bit of an inconvenient fact for their agenda.

Fri 21 Oct 2011 at 3:56 AM

DeeDee

@DeeDee: How would you measure that? I remember seeing a study saying that in USA social mobility has been going down, is lower than was previously thought, and is lower than many European countries (but still higher than most of the developing world). I can't find the study I'm thinking of but here's a good discussion of the topic: http://www.economist.com/node/15908469

Do you have a source?

Fri 21 Oct 2011 at 6:23 PM

Al

It is notably a federal offense to deface U.S. Currency since it is the property of the government not the person who possesses it.

@DeeDee: in terms of the ability of people to work themselves from lower to higher income brackets, the US is far from the world leader. Dylan Matthews writes that while "Italy and Great Britain have sharper class divisions than we do. ...most other countries do substantially better [than the US]. This includes not just Scandinavian social democracies like Denmark, Norway, and Finland (Sweden, curiously, does a bit worse) but Anglophone states such as Canada and Australia, with which the U.S. has much more in common."[1] See also this Paul Krugman for a thorough debunking of some income mobility myths.[2]

Moreover, as the pie chart on the dollar bill shows, gains in real income in the US since the 1980s have gone disproportionately to the upper 1%. Indeed, they've done way better than the rest of the upper quintile.

I just don't see how income mobility is at all an "inconvenient fact" for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The best studies support the contention that the rich are doing well while the rest of us are barely treading water. If you've got some data that shows otherwise, let's see it.

OK, so you're citing fire-breathing leftists. Krugman as a columnist is a joke. When he was writing about very specific economic matters that had little political weight, his minor celebrity may have been justified, but now he's just a punchline. How about something a little more down-to-earth?:

@Benjamin - It is only a crime to deface money if you intend to pass it as something it is not. Otherwise, you can do to the bills in your pocket whatever you want: you may set them on fire, give them away, or draw all over them. Contrary to what you have heard, your money is YOUR money. It is not the property of the government.